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138

Kids and the elderly: Both bad

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Marvin, 1/15/21

So Marvin has been doing the thing where it mostly doesn’t acknowledge the ongoing pandemic but sometimes does, like it’s been doing this week, when it has jokes to make about it, which I’m on the record as being basically fine with for gag-a-day strips like this. What has been bothering me about this week, though, is that the specific joke-topic in question has been about Jeff and Jenny having to cut Marvin’s hair themselves rather than take him to a professional, which makes me as a non-parent wonder: Do parents not … usually cut their babies’ own hair? I remember my mom cutting my hair well into my grade school years but maybe she was unusually thrifty or times have changed? Like, are there salons that specialize in baby haircuts or do you take them to a regular place or what? Whatever the case, please enjoy this strip in which Jeff waxes rhapsodically about the scissors he bought — so sharp, so very sharp — that he’ll be waving around in untrained proximity to his terrible son’s temptingly soft skull.

Mary Worth, 1/15/21

“Oh good, I can demand that she answer all my probing questions now, in public! I’m helping!”

Dennis the Menace 1/15/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because Dennis doesn’t understand what simple English words mean and because he has a serious undiagnosed food allergy!

128

Menaces true and false

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Dennis the Menace, 1/8/21

I feel like over the years Dennis the Menace has spent less time on Dennis’s actual menacing more on everyone’s second-order reactions to said menacing, or their perceptions of him as a menace, which may or may not be based in reality. Like, be honest: who’s the real menace here? The kid who’s playing fetch with his dog? Or the guy who’s buttonholed a total stranger and appears to be deep into a conversation along the lines of “You’d think with a nightmare specimen like this you’d be dealing with a deeply tainted bloodline, just generation after generation of idiots and defectives, but no! I guess it turns out that true evil can arise from the seemingly innocent! Sinister horror lurks below the surface of our every day life, and indeed inside each one of us!”

Marvin, 1/8/21

I guess maybe this joke would’ve landed better if the Miller household weren’t a largely featureless void consisting mostly of a blue rug and a enormous expanse of white wall. But even so, it’s still a little off! Marvin refused to sit in the corner, so here he is sitting … not in the corner, ha ha? It’s like someone’s been told that they can’t do poop jokes anymore, and so they’re trying to reason out what other kinds of jokes might look like from first principles, and this was their first stab at it.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/8/21

We saw a glimpse of the exterior of Chez Winkerbean in a strip just before Christmas, and I was too busy focusing on the negative to take note of the frankly enormous house that Funky and Holly live in. This is curious, considering that their income derives from managing a perpetually failing small-town pizza parlor for its fickle absentee owner, and not long ago Funky sunk his savings into a failed attempt to franchise Montoni’s shitty pizza in New York City, a metropolis noted for its pizza-snobbery. Admittedly, the real estate market in Northeastern Ohio is not exactly booming, so maybe my radar on what a 5,000-square-foot suburban McMansion would go for is off, but today we learn that the Winkerbean family has the means to drop on the order of four grand on a TV without that even being noteworthy enough for Funky to remember. What I’m trying to say here is that managing a perpetually failing small-town pizza parlor may actually be actually pretty lucrative, in the sense that it makes a great front for money laundering for organized crime.

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Poopy Thursday

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Six Chix, 12/3/20

Today’s Six Chix is a pretty compelling piece of evidence for the proposition that at least one of the Chix is a space alien attempting to use the medium of comic strips to reason out from a few pieces of data what life on earth is like. Clearly this being got word that something called “toilet paper” was relevant a few months ago. Is it still “in the conversation” today? Do humans still need to remove poop from their buttholes, or have they moved past that? This roll of toilet paper, asking for a friend (a space alien attempting to use the medium of comic strips to reason out from a few pieces of data what life on earth is like), would really like to know!

Gil Thorp, 12/3/20

So it turns out that Corina’s conflict-resolution plan for solving Milford’s quarterback controversy was to bring the two feuding players together and have them hash out their problems in an open, honest discussion. Too bad she didn’t do it a week ago, because Gil has his own solution to the problem: benching both of them and throwing in the third-string quarterback to haplessly flail around in some dumb, wacky old-timey formation that almost certainly will lose Milford most of its remaining games but might at least spawn a viral TikTok or something.

Marvin, 12/3/20

Every once in a while I feel kind of bad that one of my recurring themes on this 16-year-old blog that is essentially my life’s defining project is, “Gross, this comic strip about a baby makes jokes about poop constantly,” and I wonder if I lean too far into it, but you know what? Today’s strip is about the title character’s dad’s desire to use a leaf blower to spray dog shit everywhere, including, presumably, all over the side of his house. So I don’t feel bad anymore, or at least not about that!